'Cost-cutting' BBC creates Gaelic TV costing £257 per viewer

Gaelic TV: BBC Director General Mark Thompson plans to spend £18m on a service with a potential audience of 70,000

Less than a week after announcing mass job cuts, it has emerged that the BBC plans to spend £18million launching a Gaelic television channel.

With fewer than 70,000 Gaelic speakers in Britain, the digital service works out at a cost of £257 per potential listener, prompting MPs and media pressure groups to hit out at the "unjustifiable" waste of licence fee payers' money.

Despite producing just seven hours of programming a day, the first Gaelic station for nearly 50 years will incur annual running costs totalling an estimated £17.9million.

In a Commons written reply, Culture Secretary James Purnell also revealed that the channel will cost an additional £1.27million to set up.

Although the BBC Trust has yet to formally agree to the proposals,

the mainstream TV service is expected to begin transmission on Freeview in March next year.

John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, said: 'Given the number of people that speak Gaelic, and the proportion that are going to be watching at any one time, to spend that amount of money on a service that is going to be viewed by such a tiny number of people seems like a strange sense of priorities.

"It is difficult to justify how this represents public value."

Recent surveys show Gaelic is not even the predominant second language in Scotland, where Polish is now ahead of it.

Featuring sport, drama, children's programmes and news bulletins, the service will operate purely in Gaelic.

It will run as a partnership between BBC Scotland and the Gaelic Media Service.

The announcement came a week after BBC director-general Mark Thompson announced 2,500 posts will go in the next round of cuts, leading to 1,800 redundancies.

On top of this, there will be 10 per cent fewer original programmes made and the Television Centre in London's White City will be sold off.

There will also be budget cuts across all divisions.

Last night a spokesman for the BBC said: "The partnership arrangement aims to provide Gaelic viewers and listeners with a culturally distinctive, innovative and inclusive broadcast service.

"But these figures are slightly misleading.

"As BBC Scotland already provides some Gaelic content, we will only be spending an increase of £2.5million on the new service."